mainbutter

Eyes are one of the things that many MANY animal species recognize. Think of all the critters that use fake eyes as part of a deterrent camouflage. I think for a true test to see if a fish notices a difference between an eyed lure and a no-eyes lure, you'd want to compare a swimbait with eyes to a swimbait with no eyes and fish 'em under a bobber. Eyes give the impression that "yes, this thing is in fact a prey item, and not a stick". I much prefer oversized eyes on my lures. As far as 3D vs flat stickers or painted, I think that is definitely more just to look pretty. Fishing with lures is all about giving fish the impression that "hey, that thing is a living prey item"

1) There is no reason to buy less than 5 gallons at a time. It's too expensive to buy one gallon at a time. 55 gallons is probably overkill for you, but for anyone who does serious production, it's the only way to go. I make plastics just for myself and I'm glad I bought a 5 gallon bucket, as I've already gone through over a gallon. 2) Go with a medium plastic, and add softener, or just use a super soft plastic from the get-go. I don't know of anything i'd want to add hardener to anyways. 3) I'd say anywhere from 2-8oz of colorant per gallon of plastic, since sometimes you only need a few drops and sometimes you need 30. It does go a long way, I'll run out of plastic before I run out of colorant. This is just from my pouring experience over a couple months, some of the production guys will chime in I bet.

Carbon dioxide is a poison. I use it to euthanize feeder animals for my reptiles, it's amazing how fast it works.

And here's some that my girlfriend hand-painted

I broke out my lurecraft plastic paints last night. I used about 50/50 paint to retarder to use in the airbrush. it's not the prettiest paintjob, but I like it a lot! Basic perch pattern: green body (I used green plastic with blue flake in it that I had made up for use with frogs), fluorescent orange on the bottom, black on the top, and a couple thick black stripes down the sides. Enjoy!

I want to use lurecraft's plastic paint in my airbrush (with their retarder of course), but what do I use to clean my airbrush afterwards? They don't really say what "kind" of paint it is, so I don't know what is a good solvent for it. Would either acetone or denatured alcohol work?

Not to throw this thread off topic: Right now just about everything I use came from lurecraft.com (some molds, my plastic, softener, and colorants) and basstackle.com (some molds). Oh I also bought some salt from del-mart.com Lure craft has a DVD they sell for $15 that explains quite a bit for the newbie. You can find all that info here as well, but sometimes it's nice to have a video from a company that explains how to use their products directly.

Thanks for the tips guys And to the "dont worry about it" people, yup I completely agree it doesn't really matter. It's completely for cosmetic purposes, I'm sure the fish don't care and it doesn't affect the action of the tail. This is a hobby for me, so time spent perfecting anything is time that I'm enjoying myself. If I'm going through the trouble of making homemade lures, I'm going to go ahead and make them as pretty as I can to the best of my ability!

60-75 is probably what they all run. An interesting note I've been thinking about: I'd say the extra 15mph is not worth the extra dangers. When you think about it, if you're traveling 60 miles total drive distance in a tourney, it'll take you 60 mins at 60mph, and 48 mins at 75mph. 75 mph is a TON more dangerous than 60, or at least I feel much less "in control" at that speed. You only save yourself 12 minutes per 60 miles you travel in a single tourney at top speed. I don't think enough of these guys do the math to see exactly how much time you're saving with that kind of increase in danger levels. TBH 12, or even 20 minutes of fishing time really isn't much at all at least to me and rarely makes or breaks my fishing day, tournament or not. Then again, the only tournaments I fish are non cash-prize musky tournaments where all prizes are donations. Last one of last year's season I won myself a nice 7000i reel though

Another question to help with cosmetics on swimbaits: I've been pouring bob's line-through swimbait, and one of the things I love about it is the eyes. They're HUGE! Anyhoo I've been applying my stick-on eyes and securing them with a bit of superglue around the edges. They hold up great, but superglue doesn't give a very nice transparent and glossy smooth finish. Does anyone have any suggestion for a quick setting glue I could use instead? I'd use a clear epoxy, but it takes so long to set up and cure that I get impatient with applying eyes. Maybe nail polish? Anyone have any experience with using that for lures? Thanks in advance!

ooh good idea! I would have not thought of that b/c of open flames. When you say micro torch, do you mean basically a butane cigarette lighter?

So I've decided I wanted to ask for a bit of help. When I pour top-pour swimbait molds, after I've filled the mold and as the plastic cools, the tail section starts to get a cavity at the top (like a sinkhole developing in the middle of the meaty top part of the paddle tail) I've been remedying this by, as the cavity forms, just adding a bit more plastic, but I end up with a cosmetically poor tail with what looks like little tumors on top of the tail where I added a few drops of extra plastic to fill the cavity. Does anyone have a good solution that will help fix the cosmetic issue?

I can only imagine how many orders he got over last weekend, I know I got mine in as early as I could after getting my email, I'm sure kevin is filling the orders in the order they were recieved Sales like this make for busy times at the shop!

Payapl provides a service. It is only fair that for making payments easy on sellers, they get something for it. If you don't like the rate and think it can be done on a more affordable level, start your own paypal competitor.

Nah I had a bunch of inserts left over, I've probably got 40 inserts at least still.

I broke in a few new molds from kevin's for 1 deal! They arrived today. I need more color dyes, but I like how these turned out. Opener can't come soon enough. Enjoy! Continuing to make more of these awesome line-through swimbaits. I wanted to make a bunch of pure white ones, proven color I like to fish with swimbaits, I hope it works just as well when I get to try these out this season.

I just burnt myself again, very minor blister about half the size of a penny. It's my fault for not wearing gloves. I just wanted to remind everyone out there to be careful with this stuff, burns suck and hurt.

My 5'' stickbait just weighed in at 10-11 grams, which is roughly ~150-170 grains. I don't have enough scale accuracy to go beyond that. I use the basic formula a few posts above with LC 502 and LC's softener and very fine salt from bear's baits. It's a great basic forumula.

lol I had one of those, basically a pullstring windup toy. I never caught a darn thing on it.

No kidding! Thanks to all the mold makers for having sales. I was done with molds for the year because I just couldn't justify the exta money without these sales. Now I'll be able to throw buzz frogs, creature baits, and some craws come open water season. THANKS AGAIN!

Looks great! However, as I keep telling myself as I've been making lures this winter: It doesn't count until it lands a fish! Now the thing to do is to get out there and try to find something that is slimy and hungry! Beautiful work.

RTV silicone is preferable IMO to POP. Making POP molds is good practice since RTV silicone isn't as wonderfully inexpensive as POP, but still affordable. Silicone molds are durable, flexible, and easy to do-it-yourself. I don't know much about CNC machines, but THEORETICALLY if you used one to carve out your mold from a block of wood, you could seal it with a very thin coat of epoxy (not too much or you start to loose details such as scales and carved gillplates or anything similar) and pour yourself some soft plastics probably.

Got the same email, finally rounding out my complete tackle box with 4 new molds. Now all I'm missing is a good jerk bait or two

I know makelure.com has a bunch of the larry dahlberg vids, it might be on there.